When a patient is discharged from a healthcare facility a case manager or discharge planner assists the patient with discharge activities. These discharge activities may include assessing a patient's support system, reviewing patient data, verifying benefit plans, obtaining and managing referrals, coordinating activities, providing education, managing a discharge plan of care, discharging the patient to different locations and with durable medical equipment and transportation. Some patient discharge plans are simple while others are complex and take a great deal of time to implement.
Currently, it is difficult to balance the workload of discharge case managers within a healthcare facility. Current systems do not determine the complexity of discharge plans for each patient and only look to the number of cases being handled by a case manager. Current systems also do not provide any method for tracking case managers who are dealing with complex-discharge plans and those who are dealing with less complex discharge plans. Thus, some case managers create multiple complex discharge plans for patients while others are dealing with simpler discharge plans.